Two Rideau Street bar employees were found guilty Thursday of aggravated assault in the beating of a customer who suffered life-threatening head injuries.

Jesse Brouillard, 32, and Steven Taing, 26, were filmed by a street camera that Justice Célynne Dorval said offered the “most unbiased and accurate depiction of what happened.”

Dorval rejected the evidence of eyewitnesses to the June 2012 incident that began as an early hours altercation inside Studio/Skybar on Dalhousie Street just south of Rideau Street and ended with victim Ikechukwu Ukwu falling backwards and smashing his head on the concrete sidewalk.

Ukwu, who seconds before had been ejected from the bar for allegedly causing “trouble,” had to be placed in a drug-induced coma and for a period was totally dependent on others for his daily care.

He was released after nearly five months in hospital and recently filed a $1-million lawsuit against Taing and Brouillard and others.

Dorval ruled that the video, controlled from inside the bar, had been tampered with and was restored only with the help of RCMP technical experts.

Before the video was restored, Taing had lied to the police, telling them he was not on the street when Ukwu was assaulted but later said he acted in self defence.

There was “no air of reality” to that defence, ruled Dorval.

The attack on Ukwu, then 26, was spontaneous retribution, she added.

“Each had the intention to assault him,” said the judge, “and it was quite easily foreseeable that an unexpected assault, on a cement sidewalk, would result in bodily harm.”

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